Reasons for Voyaging
 "I possibly didn't think much about the impact of our Pacific location until I left New Zealand for four years in the late 1970s" |
Reasons for Voyaging, by local sculptor Graham Bennett, is located at the main entrance to the Gallery site. It is both a marker to the site and a welcome to visitors.
Consisting of an informal grouping of seven stainless steel poles of varying heights up to 13.2 metres, it was designed so that visitors can walk through, under and around it. Conveying a sense of arrival and departure, invitation and challenge, the work – as its title suggests – encourages us to consider the experiences and motivations of all visitors to New Zealand, including Māori and Polynesian voyagers, European settlers and recent migrants.
The full moon rotations can be viewed for free from the Sculpture Garden. The next rotations will occur at 12 noon on the following days:
- 1 March 2010
- 30 March 2010
- 29 April 2010
- 28 May 2010
- 26 June 2010
- 26 July 2010
- 25 August 2010
- 23 September 2010
Below, Graham Bennett talks to Felicity Milburn, Curator of Contemporary Art, about his life, his inspiration and the background to 'Reasons for Voyaging'.
Your work often seems to reflect its Pacific location, and you have indicated an interest in nautical, coastal and geographical contexts. Where do these interests come from?
In part, perhaps. My childhood, spent living in Nelson, reinforced our coastal existence. We had a corrugated iron bach on an extension of the boulder bank at Cable Bay and the waves used to actually wash up to the door in a storm. I spent a lot of time on the sea and wandering around on the shoreline collecting and sorting. My family's home was on the hill overlooking the harbour. We observed the trading boats, my father recording their movements for Lloyds of London, commercial and cultural comings and goings. In travelling I am always conscious of the distance from the sea.
With its references to maps and latitude lines, your work considers where New Zealand is placed on the globe. Are you interested in New Zealand being part of the Pacific as well as the physical realities of living on an island?
 Graham Bennett by Johannes van Kan |
I possibly didn't think much about the impact of our Pacific location until I left New Zealand for four years in the late 1970s. I am interested in how various peoples reference their environment, their symbols for a sense of place. I'm curious about how our particular environment and location could connect our thinking. Even the linear trajectory of our islands could have an impact on our vision of ourselves. For years I've been experimenting with proposals for installations building on the linear extension of New Zealand and its/our orientation in the Pacific, exploring aspects of migration, colonisation, trade and identity. Looking forward, looking back, looking up. I have incorporated these physical elements and measured space into all my large scale works to date.
You have said that Reasons for Voyaging is, in part, about a sense of belonging - does this include the sense of identity you get from a place?
My thoughts in planning this work over the last year or so have included notions of departure and return, convergence and divergence, conjunctions of identity. Recently, I've been reading the diary of one of my ancestors, written in 1864, about making the long sailing trip after leaving Scotland from Newfoundland to here. The writer, travelling with her family of six on a small brigantine, speculates about a new life in New Zealand, what she might find here and some of her reasons for leaving. It is interesting to also read and compare the speculations and theories on Polynesian migrations and the circumstances, social structures, skills, desires and spirit that surround these. I've had interesting conversations with people in Japan curious about migration and colonial issues and comparing it with their own history: 'how does it feel when you don't have a long past, do you feel as though you belong?'. I recall a statement someone made recently that, as a New Zealander, you get a feeling that you can still write on a fresh page and make a difference. You can do something and make a difference and you can do it in a fresh way. I'm sure there is something in this.
You've described drawing as an important part of your art practice. Do you see the sculptures as direct extensions of your drawings - or are they more formal explorations?
The big environmental installations were extended drawings. They started out as pencil and paint studies and developed into plans to place reduced architectural statements into the natural environment. But an equally important part was to then stand back from it and make extensive studies of the experimental spaces around and within the temporary installations. The preliminary drawings and research help decide on materials, scale, alignments etc. The visual recordings documented interventions from, and relationships with, natural forces; the rising and setting sun, the moon and the tides.
Obviously a work like Reasons for Voyaging involves extensive technical design and construction, do you see that part of it as a foil to the more expressive part of your work?
Reasons for Voyaging is slightly different to some of the others because while the other works were specific to site, it's different responding to something that is also being constructed (the new Christchurch Art Gallery) and which isn't there yet. There is an element of chance and risk in this and although I have planned it very carefully, in models and drawings, there are many decisions still to be made, which are technical and practical, but also aesthetic. I continue to do drawings, revisiting my starting points and nutting through problems: I suppose it is a foil, one to the other.
Some of the first works I saw of yours were a mixture of very small sculptures and slide images of the large scale environmental projects, so I am interested in how those things collide, if one is an extension of the other or whether a different aesthetic applies to each?
It's an interesting question - difficult to answer succinctly. I know many artists are quite focussed in these matters. In Japan, particularly, some artists seem bewildered that I would shift scales to the extent that I do, and surprised that I do so much drawing, or that I would even consider doing printmaking as well. I am sure I heard the Japanese equivalent of "Jack of all trades...". I enjoy immensely making small things and thinking of them as big, sticking a camera in amongst them, or making drawings and thereby reducing them to two dimensions where they could be any scale, just as I enjoy doing drawings for, during and after making a sculpture and rethinking the scale. After Demarcation, the work I made on the Nelson Boulder Bank in 1996, I made numerous structures using a single stone support - a piece of the land form? An island? Our part of the Pacific? Our part of the globe? Making small things and thinking big, making big things and thinking small; both are part of my process. The model making part of a larger commission is something I enjoy, although it is time consuming it is an important part of coming to terms with the shapes, spaces and dynamics of the site.
To some artists, the idea of collaborating with an architect in the way that you have with Reasons for Voyaging would be something they wouldn't want to do, whereas I get the sense it is something you have really enjoyed.
Yes, I have. The interesting challenge is to try and construct in the mind shapes and spaces that exist only as plans, elevations and computer walk-throughs. Discussions with the architect, David Cole, in the early stages were important. Ideas and philosophies were shared and, following my resolution of the concept, involvement in resource consent planning and maintaining an awareness of and involvement in the overall project have all played a part. I have found this demanding but there are considerable advantages in integrating a sculptural object into the planning part of a building - it requires different approaches than those responding to a given or completed space.
What about the future? How close is what you have done, and what you are doing at the moment, to what you would like to achieve?
 Eleven Times (detail) Graham Bennett. Powder coated cast aluminium. 1800 x 800 x 800mm. |
The horizon is always shifting - if you think you have got near perhaps you have stopped! The individual works have less importance than the pathway, or the overall trajectory, and I'm interested in where this project, or the next project, or the one before, sits in all of that. I like to be open and to allow enough time/space in my process that I can deviate down side streets. I don't have a plan as to where I am going, or what I want to do next, it evolves. Commissioned works, where there is a response to a certain brief or situation, can open up new ideas and new ways of working that are often a surprise.
As to what I want to do in the future, all I'm really looking to do is to continue to make things that are honest, reduced and personal. There's a constant refinement, but I'd like to think the works of the future will maintain some sense of urgency, of spontaneity, of risk taking. They need to be a scaffolding for meaning and seeing, narratives of the land, this land. Markers and thresholds; not necessarily permanent, not necessarily important, not necessarily large. Threatened by, or coexisting with, nature, a sense of standing on the surface, standing on the edge of the Pacific. Creating an edge...
"I recall a statement someone made recently that, as a New Zealander, you get a feeling that you can still write on a fresh page and make a difference. You can do something and make a difference and you can do it in a fresh way. I'm sure there is something in this.
